[All Platforms] Consolidate duplicates

[Kerumen]

It would be nice if Spotify can recognize identical songs to avoid duplicates in your Liked songs and playlists.

This is pretty common for songs released first as a single then within an album.

For example, if you like the single one, the UI will not show the song as liked when you browse the album. And if you like the song in the album, you'll end up with a duplicated version in your library.

This also happens a lot for songs that you listen in Daily Mix or Discover weekly. If it's not the exact same song you have already liked before, the UI is inconsistent and you can save a duplicate.

Apparently, there is already an internal merge mechanism as the play counter is not split between the different versions of the songs. Maybe this can also be used to consolidate the UI.

Repost of https://community.spotify.com/t5/Closed-Ideas/Your-Music-Remove-Duplicated-Songs/idi-p/4546787 which didn't get enough kudos.

[nintynuts]

I really love spotify as a concept but, as usual with anything, people do things which clutter up the system and make it harder to use.

What I am suggesting is using the same sort of software shazam and soundhound use to identify the fingerprints of songs and group together duplicate tracks. This has many benefits:
- People can star the song once and it can now refer those people to all the albums it appears on, improving discover suggestions.

- Song popularity will be more accurate as it can add up the popularity from all albums, not just the original one (I have found duplicates can have quite varying ratings despite being the same)

- Spotify have to store less songs in their database, saving costly storage space and search times!

- People find the songs they want faster and more accurately because there's only one version.

- New albums would get instant popularity ratings from any pre-released tracks, giving them a head start.

- Album Artwork can be cycled while the track plays, so it's a bit more fun to watch.

Some extensions to this I have thought of include:

- Having labels for genuine duplicates which should be kept like 'Mono' 'Live', 'Radio Edit', 'Karaoke' rather than it being part of the track name.

- Similarly labelling 'Cover', 'Tribute' etc for songs being sung by unknown groups or cover bands (this can then be used to list associated cover/tribute bands on band pages)

- Validating artists of songs using the fingerprint software on segments of the track rather than the whole thing to give credit to the original artists when people remix or sample songs.

- Disallowing 'as made famous by' and other references in album titles and track names to the original band when it's a cover.

I am a little OCD, so that's where this mostly stems from, but I do think all of these things would genuinely make spotify better.

Hopefully this resonates with some people and we can see this happen!

[user-removed]

I love it. This would greatly improve my spotify experience, such as making playlist-creating much more fun. This is probably one of the best things spotify can do right now.

[SPQR3]

As far as I know they already have something similar. If a song is present on multiple albums than they become "connected", the little chain icon is meant to show that. The problem that  it quite often doesn't work correctly, probably it is a lot of work to administrate.

[nintynuts]

@ SPQR3 

That system seems to be mostly used to link singles with the albums they later appear on or albums with deluxe versions or something like that, and there only seems to be one link per song, which is inadequate.

What I'm suggesting is an automated system using audio fingerprint technology and metadata analysis then the questionable (less than 90% match or thereabouts) connections are sent to the label/artist to confirm the change to make sure things aren't done incorrectly, offloading the admin work from Spotify. And of course a 'report incorrect association' option in the context menu just in case.

My idea could replace that link icon with an "Appears On" column with "X Albums" and "X Playlists" each of which can be clicked to access the relevant page. I was going to mockup a 'Track' Page which details the original artist, popular covers and alternate versions of each, lists of mixes/samples and less popular covers/tributes. But haven't got around to it yet.

[WastedJack]

On a related note it would be nice to click an artist and below the "popular tracks" section it would be cool to see a section for "starred by you".

[Professor_MC]

I added my starred songs to the saved song list.  They now display when I click "Songs" under My Music.   If I go to an artist page or an album page for one of the songs I have saved the song does not have the check by it to show that it is in the saved song list.  So if I am looking at an artist page I can't see which songs I have already saved to My Music.  This happened to some but not all of the songs I moved over to the saved list.  Some songs appear twice on the Songs list even thought they only exist once in Spotify (no alternates exist).  This really messes up the utility of Saved music if it is possible to duplicate songes like a playlist rather than have it be a database of saved tracks.

[Peter__]

Have you tried logging out and back in again?

I've seen some issues too with multiple versions of tracks causing issues.

[user-removed]

Totally agree, this would be great.  Showing the original album, release, and re-mastered-re-re-release is totally unenecessary.  Consolidate them all into one.

[nemof]

my personal take on it it similar, but allows a little more granularity. 

a per artist inline filter, similar to the one shown on playlists, but with more options. You could have global options, and then artist specific options that override global ones.

so eg, you could automatically hide all reissues and best ofs globally, but for a particular artist that you want to see them for, set them to be visible in the artists filter.

i made a crappy picture to convey the idea